BSFA Review – Vector #279

Well, it has been a bloody good year for British SF. But, as our BSFA Review Poll shows, it has also been a resurgent year for British SF: it features three debuts and two long overdue returns.

I’m delighted that one of those British debuts jointly tops our poll: The Race by Nina Allan. Over the last decade, Allan has been quietly building one of the most impressive reputations in the short fiction field, culminating in her BSFA Award for Short Fiction last year with Spin. Kerry Dodd reviews the novel overleaf and finds it a “thought provoking and gripping book which peels back the emotive struggles of the human condition, focussing upon the connections between people’s lives, their emotions and, most powerfully, the nature of reality.” Creatively, Allan’s career seems unbounded but the publishing industry needs to catch-up and bring her to a wider audience.

So the community owe thanks to Newcon Press who have been having a pretty good year themselves. As well as The Race, they also published our bronze medallist, The Moon King by Neil Williamson, and the BSFA Award nominated story ‘The Honey Trap’ by Ruth E J Booth (which you can read for yourself in the awards booklet elsewhere in this mailing). Like Allan, Williamson has come up through the short fiction scene – a reminder of how vital Interzone remains as a testing ground for new talent. As Kate Oylett put it in Vector #277: “It’s a real delight to find a debut full-length novel where the characters pop, the situations glisten with sheer wonder and you realise you were meant to have put the book down and gone to bed sensibly a good hour or more ago.”

Nina Allan shares first place with another resurgent writer: Jeff Vandermeer. Who could have predicted that this cult weird fiction author would publish the critical and commercial international science fiction hit of 2014? Still less that it would be a thoroughly contemporary take on the mid-20th Century estrangement of writers like Budrys, Ballard and the Sturgatskys. In our last issue, Dan Hartland described it as “preternaturally fertile, the sort of layered and constructed fiction that readers pine for and so rarely receive” so perhaps it is slightly surprising it didn’t appear on the BSFA Aware shortlist for Best Novel alongside The Race and The Moon King, particularly given this year’s shortlist ran to ten books due to a tie for fourth place.

Dave Hutchinson published his first short story collection in 1978 but didn’t publish a novel till 2001 and has only followed it up now. Likewise Simon Ings’s last science fiction novel came out in 1999. Europe In Autumn (reviewed by Ian Sales) and Wolves both show that British science fiction has been missing out.

No such pause for Ann Leckie. Ancillary Sword (reviewed by Anne F Wilson) immediately followed up 2013’s international sensation, Ancillary Justice. That debut won the BSFA Award for Best Novel – along with every other award going – and you wouldn’t want to bet against it doing the same again. Or indeed for the Hugo.
Robert Jackson Bennett has probably also got a shout of getting on the Hugo ballot with City Of Stairs, another change of direction for this versatile writer. It was reviewed by Gary Dalkin last issue: “an ambitious and accomplished novel with interesting things to suggest about the relationships between peoples, their cultures and their gods.”

Finally, the poll confirms Frances Hardinge’s position as queen of British children’s fiction, sneaks in a characteristically slippery work by Karen Joy Fowler and heralds the arrival of Renaissance Man Paul Kingsnorth. Let’s hope 2015 is half as good.

BSFA Review Poll

=1) The Race by Nina Allan
=1) The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer
3) The Moon King by Neil Williamson
4) Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
5) Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
6) Wolves by Simon Ings
7) City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett
8) Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge
9) We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
10) The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth